There’s a case to be made that against these invisible evils, design that is honest, conspicuous, and at times inconvenient, could now start to establish itself as not just good, but necessary.

After all, the best things in life often demand concerted effort or acquired taste. It would be a shame if, in smoothing everything out, we lost the capacity to appreciate deeply or discerningly through effort and understanding.

“Jankspace is how you feel when you just used Touch ID to access your keychain and you’re desperately reaching for the power cord to plug in your phone and get it powered up so that you can get the code from the OTP text message and activate your hotspot so as to get the email confirmation for a password change in time so you can access the cloud

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friction is a mechanism that asks us to notice, to sense, to interact. It’s a tether to effort and patience. It serves as a gateway to thoughts and experiences that resist instant legibility.

There’s a common fallacy that brand friction means making things difficult for the sake of being difficult, which we wholeheartedly reject. In this regard, friction is misleading. The idea is not to make things difficult, but to go the extra mile. To put in the necessary effort. To spend that extra bit of time, energy, or dare we say...profit, to... See more

It feels as if Dieter Rams philosophy of good design is “invisible” has become perverted by Silicon Valley’s particular brand of surveillance capitalism—justification for the always-on observation, tracking, measuring, and predicting of every consumer behavior.

technorati, of course, attempt to mask their rampant pursuit of efficiency by cosplaying industrial monks

Common sense would have you buy a pair of shoes that don’t need breaking in. But we do it anyway, because we know it’s worth it.